Christianity
The Defeat of the Jerusalem Garrison
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: 5 November 1998
A Storm on the Lake
Miracles were either real events which were deliberately disguised by the author or parables rendered as the truth. A storm is scriptural metaphor for hostilities. If this is not a Christian insertion then Mark is distorting a speech by Jesus preparing his followers for the coming battle for the kingdom—telling them not to fear the storm—but it has been heavily changed in the telling. The miracle of the walking on water, if “epites” is to be read as “on” not “towards” or “besides”, both of which are more acceptable translations in the context, unless the translator is determined to have a miracle, is part of the same story which has somehow been split.
Jesus seems to have used in his speech elements from Jonah, Nahum and Psalms 65, 83 and 107. In Nahum, God will avenge his people. In Psalms 83 gentile nations surrounding Judaea plotted against the Jews and cut them off from being a nation but, these enemies of Israel, God would pursue with a tempest, and terrify with a storm until they were confounded and perished. On the other hand the Nazarenes need not fear God’s storm because in Psalms 107 they need only cry to the Lord in their trouble and God would calm the storm and bring them into a safe haven. In Psalms 65 we find that God stilleth the noise of the seas, the noise of their waves, and the tumult of the people. In Jonah, God sends a storm to punish Jonah, but Jonah sleeps through it when everyone else was fearful. The men rowed hard to get back to the land but they could not. His song from the belly of the fish ends with the name of Jesus! “Salvation is of God”.
The reason for the speech is that Jesus is starting off with his Nazarenes on their way to Jerusalem. They decide to cross the the Sea of Galilee into the country of the gentiles known as Decapolis which involves making the trip in a flotilla of small boats—the clue that this is genuine tradition—Mark makes it clear there is more than one boat showing that the Nazarene band was of significant size. Mark cannot report any of this without betraying that the Nazarenes are not a band of peace-loving yokels so rewrites the event as a miracle taking his cues from the speech and the scene of a flotilla of small boats setting off across the sea. Jesus might well have remained calm when others were unsure and excitable.
Why did Jesus want to cross the Sea of Galilee? The practical reasons were to avoid travelling through either Herod’s territory of Galilee or the Roman domain of Judaea. More importantly, the scriptures ordained that he should. In Ezekiel 39, we find that God promises to smite all the enemies of Israel represented by the great prince Gog—for the Nazarenes, the Greeks and the Romans. In Ezekiel 39:11, God promises to make a graveyard of Gog’s armies in the valley of them that pass through on the east of the sea. In Ezekiel, it meant the trade route up the coast, to the east of the Mediterranean Sea, but the Nazarenes in typical Essene fashion would have read this as east of the Sea of Galilee. This was the reason for Jesus’s excursion across the water. He felt it was God’s will so, for him to succeed, he was destined to enter Judaea by the eastern route, beyond the Jordan. Moreover, Ezekiel prophesies that the weapons left behind by Gog’s armies would provide kindling for the children for seven years. In Essene eschatology, this pointed to the first seven years of the forty years of war described in the War Scroll, confirming to Jesus that it was a necessary step in the calling down of the kingdom.
If the miracle of walking on water has become detached from Jesus’s rousing speech, the implication could be that Jesus also drew upon Job 9:5-8 where God moves mountains, shakes the earth, stops the sun from rising and treads on water, and Psalms 77:16-20 where he leads his people through his paths in the great waters out of a fearful storm guided by Moses and Aaron. Moses and Aaron as king and priest represented the titles that Jesus had as the Nasi. So he was using the psalm to assure his followers that he would lead them successfully under God’s guidance in the coming battle. Somehow in the oral tradition the two parts of the speech got separated and we finished up with two consequent miracles.
The Fig Tree Cursed
Jesus’s hatred of the Romans is revealed in the “miracle” of the withering of the fig tree (Mt 21:19-21; Mk 11:20-21).The story in Matthew is that Jesus was hungry…
And seeing a fig tree by the way side, he came to it, and found nothing thereon, but leaves only. And he saith unto it, Let there be no fruit from thee henceforward forever. And immediately the fig tree withered away.
More truthfully, in Mark, it was not immediately dead. It was dead the next day! This episode has offered difficulties for Christians because Jesus is considered to be acting uncharacteristically.
The miracle of the fig tree preceded the cleansing of the temple as Mark indicates—indeed it preceded the entry into the city—but it was not a miracle. The gospels of Matthew and Mark report the incident as an actual event—a miracle—but it was plainly a parable. Mark tells us it was not the season for figs so why should Jesus expect to find sustenance on it? For those with ears to hear it shouts out that the story is a parable.
Elsewhere (Mt 24:32; Mk 13:28) is a short metaphor of the signs of the times, called the parable of the fig tree because the Nazarene oral tradition knew of a fig tree parable, but Mark had turned it into a miracle and so had to introduce this to cover the missing parable. Plainly the original parable was re-written as a miracle. That Jesus theatrically ring barked an actual fig tree, thus killing it, is possible.
Christians have generally regarded the fig tree as Israel which Jesus cursed because they had failed as the Chosen People. This false interpretation is because some Old Testament passages use the fig tree as an alternative to the vine as a metaphor for Israel, though elsewhere it seems to mean gentiles, so that vine and fig tree covers all mankind. In fact, the fig tree was the Roman Empire. Jesus says the fig-tree would be barren forever—he would render Rome impotent. Jeremiah 28:10-14 uses a similar metaphor. The disciples were amazed at this but Jesus goes on to say (Mt 21:21) that they could throw “this mountain” into the sea if they had faith. What was “this mountain” other than the might of Rome. A mountain is a common metaphor for an empire and is so used in Revelation.
The fig tree was the symbol of Rome because, in the myth of the foundation of the city, the abandoned twins Romulus and Remus are sheltered by a fig tree while being suckled by a she-wolf and a woodpecker. When the gentile enemy’s city arms include a fig tree, there is no mistaking gospel references here and in Luke 13:6-9. In John 1:48 Jesus sees Nathanael under a fig tree, meaning that he accepted the power of Rome—he was a collaborator. Jesus wins him over to the cause of the revolution. Zacchaeus climbed into a Pharaoh’s fig tree, a sycomore, in Luke, meaning he too was a collaborator. Those who had ears to hear would have recognised the fig-tree as Rome. Ever since the fig tree, the sycomore and the carob in Middle Eastern mythology, have been considered unholy trees which offer perches for demons.
What really happened was that Jesus was about to attack Jerusalem. He reassured his followers, with a morale boosting speech using a fig tree as a metaphor for Rome, that they would succeed in defeating the might of the gentile if they had faith in God. With the coming of the kingdom God would make them world leaders with His miracle on the mount of Olives.
Jesus concludes the speech by drawing lessons from the parable, but this part has been transferred until after the cleansing of the temple because Mark has dramatized it and has to allow time to pass for the tree to wither. The time was the time needed to defeat the Jerusalem garrison and emerge victorious The Roman fig-tree had withered!
Those with God in their hearts can cast a mountain—meaning Rome—into the sea. Luke 17:5-6 has an alteration—it is a mulberry tree which is uprooted and dropped into the sea. Luke actually writes a sycamine tree, which is a mulberry but since the mulberry is a small tree no more than 30 feet high whereas the sycomore tree is a large tree, giant in girth, with widespreading branches and huge roots, Luke plainly meant the latter. Without doubt the tree thrown into the sea, like the mountain, represented Roman power so it would have been a large fig tree rather than a modest mulberry bush.
The Gadarene Demoniac
The most bizarre event in the gospels is the curing of the Gadarene Demoniac. It is bizarre because it is a crucial event distorted beyond recognition. It could not have been recognized without giving the game away about Jesus and the Nazarenes. First, the gentile bishops were not sure whether to call the demoniac, a Gadarene demoniac, a Gerasene demoniac or a Gergesene demoniac. All of these names appear in different manuscripts casting doubt on the situation of the miracle which, on the face of it, was Decapolis. Having performed this miracle Jesus and his men immediately return across the Sea of Galilee, making the whole round trip pointless. Mark had a pericope about a trip in a flotilla across the sea but did not know what happened then so he brought them back.
Nazarene convention is that those who wish to oppose Jesus or expose him as the messiah are called unclean spirits. That applies here—the demoniac is an unclean spirit because he names Jesus as the messiah (Son of God) and, in normal fashion, Jesus drives out the demon but in this story there is a mass of puzzling detail. The lunatic is naked (Lk 8:27), he came from behind tombs, he had often been bound with chains and had broken them, the spirit begs not to be tortured, suddenly there are many of them (there is a“ host of us”) and their name is Legion, indeed there were 2000 unclean spirits. They were driven in the form of swine over a cliff into the sea and were drowned.
The lunatic seems to have been a superman who could not be bound by fetters or chains. From this it should be obvious that he is not an actual man but a metaphor for something immensely powerful, uncontrollable and defiled. He is a metaphor for the might of Rome. Jews abhored nudity, often a euphemism for sexual exposure as Leviticus 18 and 20 makes clear. Essenes felt the same way. The Community Rule prescribes a penance of thirty days for a man who accidentally exposes himself while urinating, and a penance of six months for a man who deliberately goes naked. At the time of the Maccabees, to the prudish Jews such practices as exercising naked in the gymnasium, as the Greeks did, was considered a disgusting violation of the law. Romans were identified with the Greeks—both were from across the Great Sea, the People of the Sea, the Kittim of the scrolls, and had in common the Greek culture. For Jews, tombs and swine are unclean. They signify gentiles—the Romans. Thus many of the identifying features of the demoniac label him a gentile and therefore a Roman.
And why the name “Legion” which, together with the actual number mentioned, screams out Roman Legion, the equivalent of a modern military regiment. Was it a Roman legion?
When the demon first introduced himself as “Legion”, any ancient hearer must immediately have thought of Roman troops. What historical events underlie all this is now quite impossible to discover.John Bowden
J Bowden, a chief executive of the Student Christian Movement, who is mainly an honest enquirer into the problems of Christianity, ignores his hero, Ernst Troeltsch, here. Probability, analogy and correlation suggest that the passage indeed concerns Roman soldiers, but most Christians do not care to look too closely.
2000 seems a peculiar number of devils but a legion was normally 6000 strong. There are, though, reasons and occasions why fighting units might not be up to strength. The 2000 mentioned might have been those killed or captured, the remainder having withdrawn. Or Legion might have just been a way of denoting that the soldiers were Roman—part of a legion—because the governor of Judaea only had 2000 legionaries at his disposal, about three or four cohorts. The biblical scholar J Jeremias has pointed out that the Aramaic word which meant no more than soldiers might have been translated Legion, and so we are not bound to be talking about a full legion. Whatever the truth of the number, if the Greek of Mark is based on an Aramaic original we still have the curiosity that the unclean spirits evidently were soldiers.
The Greek used in describing the demoniac and his cure is violent in the extreme though toned down in translation. The words are—dismembered or pulled in pieces, completely crushed or shattered, mangled or chopped down and tortured. On the face of it they refer to actions of the madman but no one so violently lunatic could survive at all, so one can guess that Mark has changed a few subjects and objects. The steep place that the swine run violently down is really a cliff that they plunged over. The hints here are of a violent event perhaps involving the capture (chains), torture (the legion of demons begged not to be tortured) and death by falling over a cliff, drowning or garroting (the Greek translated drowning means choking in general) of 2000 soldiers.
Graves and Podro in The Nazarene Gospel Restored felt obliged to explain the obvious allusion to Roman soldiers in this miracle and did so by speculating that, by a scribal error, a reader’s annotation referring to a Roman defeat had been mistakenly adopted into the text of the gospel at the time of the Jewish War. They were too cautious.
Was there really a battle between Nazarenes and Romans in which a Roman Legion was defeated and 2000 prisoners captured, tortured and choked or driven over a cliff? If there were Roman records of this event they would have been destroyed long ago by the Christians when they achieved power in the fourth century. We do know the Roman Tenth Legion (the one called “Fretensis”—there was another Tenth Legion) was based in Syria, which included Judaea, and its standard carried the image of a boar, a pig. From about the time of the Jewish War this legion seems to have been permanently stationed in Jerusalem with its camp on the site in the Upper City where earlier Herod’s palace and the Upper Room of the last supper were believed to have been situated. The Fretensis legion might have been assigned to Judaea before then—as early as 20 AD! The Gadarene swine perhaps referred explicitly to this legion and not just generally to gentiles.
It might seem incredible that Jesus’s band should have been strong enough to defeat a Roman legion though remarkable victories occurred only a few decades later during the Jewish War, and had occurred before in the time of Archelaus when the Roman legate of Syria, Quintillus Varus, had to come into Judaea with three legions, four troops of cavalry and Syrian and Arab auxiliaries to put down extensive uprisings. Conceivably the 2000 defeated by the Nazarenes were not Roman professionals but poorly motivated conscripts—raw troops inadequately trained and equipped. Perhaps too they were badly led.
Now if our interpretation is correct and swine was an insulting reference to Romans, the incident need not have been set in a gentile country—it could have been in Judaea. If it were in Judaea, the reference to the Romans as swine was too transparent because the Jewish aversion to swine was well known, so for credibility’s sake the scene had to be set in a gentile country. Mark apparently set the scene deliberately in Decapolis, the gentile country facing Galilee across the lake, using his knowledge that the Nazarenes had crossed the lake at some point.
The ten Greek cities of the federation of Decapolis, which included the cities of Gadara and Gerasa, were set up by Pompey in 63 BC as a customs union and as frontier territory, a Roman buffer against the Arabs and the Parthians. Decapolis was under the protection of Rome and was accordingly taxed as a Roman province just as Judaea was. Mark having placed the incident in Decapolis, the Roman demoniac became one of its citizens.
However, a mistake made throughout the gospels is to assume that words like Gadarene and Gerasene are Greek names when they are often Greek renderings of Semitic words. Gadarene or Gerasene might be a distortion of an Aramaic word describing the event, to disguise its real meaning. Mark does this elsewhere in his gospel as in the case of Capernaum. If the mention of the cities of Gadara or Gerasa is bogus, it readily explains a problem which has puzzled scholars—neither is by the edge of lake Genesaret. Gerasa was forty miles inland!
Gerasene comes from “qara” which refers to tearing one’s garments to bare grievous sorrow of the heart, as at the news of a death or disaster. In the gospels Caiaphas does this when he takes Jesus to be blaspheming. More significantly, when the people had forsaken God, He proved He was the true king of Israel by sending Elisha to perform miracles, after the human claimant to the kingdom had torn his garments in impotent rage. Evidently the Nazarenes had given qara messianic associations from these and other scriptural precedents.
In Joel 2:13, God tells his people to repent and rend their hearts rather than their garments. In 1 Samuel 15:28, it is used figuratively of tearing a kingdom from a bad ruler when David was chosen as God’s successor to Saul. The sense that comes over is that the Gerasenes are those who have made Israel rend her clothes in sorrow, those who are not God’s chosen as ruler of Israel, those whom God will remove if the children of Israel rend their hearts and repent. The Gerasenes are the Roman oppressors!
However Gadarene might be closer to the truth. Gadarene might be a Hellenization of the word, “qidron”, meaning a dark or black place—none other than the brook Kidron which flows in a deep valley between the temple and the Mount of Olives! Another name of this valley is the valley of Jehoshaphat (meaning Jehovah judges), the scene of the final judgement in the passage from Joel quoted above. It was therefore (and still is) lined with the tombs of those hoping to be judged as righteous and resurrected into the kingdom.
Now if Jesus and his band of Nazarenes had destroyed a Roman legion on the way to Jerusalem why would the citizens of the city have wanted him to depart (Mk 5:17). The Jews who had been eager for a saviour messiah should have been delighted, yet they were not grateful that Legion had been driven out—they were frightened and begged the Nazarenes to leave. The answer is given by a more careful reading of Mark. He says:
they that fed the swine fled, and told it in the city.Mark 5:14
He is speaking about the Jews who made a comfortable living out of providing for the Roman soldiers—the collaborators, and we can be sure it was the chief collaborators, the Sadducees, that came back with them from the city and begged Jesus to depart. They were the ones who stood to lose. That is just the behaviour you might expect of collaborators in a dependency faced with the possibility of retribution against themselves by the dominant power. The Pharisees would have had the same attitude. They would have been glad to be permanently liberated but distrusted Jewish princes, realized it could not last and feared the consequences, especially if the guerrilla army remained in the area.
Jesus refused to accept the cured maniac as a follower, implying that some soldiers had offered to change sides and support him. This might suggest that some at least of the Legion were allies, not native Romans but opportunists ready to fight for whoever was likely to win, and not soldiers of the highest morale. If Jesus released any and sent them on their way, to proclaim the great things the Lord hath done, it could only be because they had offered to support him. But Jesus wanted only Jews. These were gentiles and there was no time for them to be circumcised as proselytes, recover and join God’s soldiers. With this victory the gates of kingdom had begun to open! However the last three verses are in the unmistakeable style of Mark the editor and have been composed by him for his gentile readers.
The conclusion to all this is that here we have the Nazarene victory over the Romans which made them withdraw from Jerusalem to get reinforcements from Caesarea on the coast or even from Syria. The skeptic might wonder, if our reconstruction is correct and the incident was so embarrassing to the first gentile Christians, why the passage should have been included in the gospels at all. The answer is that it is genuine tradition. Those who knew the truth were repeating the story and it could not be ignored. Instead it was re-written and reinterpreted, as other difficult instances were. The bishops told the gentile converts who had been hearing stories from Palestinian Jews:
It wasn’t quite like that. This is what really happened…
What we have in the gospels is the attempt of the bishops to render acceptable stories of an astonishing military victory by their God over their rulers, the Romans.
The Entry into Jerusalem
Mark 11:2 to 7, in which Jesus sends two disciples to gather an ass, are verses considered by Christian scholars difficult. The reason is that they do not want to accept the obvious—Jesus had already arranged for a suitable ass to be available. Jesus looks to be devious, the miraculous is removed, and the implication is that he had other followers in or around Jerusalem—they were of course the Essenes. Christians also like to think that the colt of the ass signifies humbleness, but unless they are really stubborn they cannot deny that Jesus was deliberately fulfilling the prophecy of Zechariah 9:9, which in turn stems from Jacob’s testament to Judah:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy king cometh unto thee: he is just, and having salvation; lowly and riding upon an ass, even upon a colt, the foal of an ass… And he shall speak peace unto the nations: and his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the river to the ends of the earth.Genesis 49:11)
This passage is purely messianic. It states unequivocally that the king will ride into Jerusalem on a foal. For what purpose? It is worth quoting succeeding passages in Zechariah:
When I have bent Judah for me, filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, O Greece, and made thee as the sword of a mighty man.Zech 9:13
And they shall be as mighty men, which tread down their enemies in the mire of the streets in the battle: and they shall fight, because the Lord is with them, and the riders on horses shall be confounded.Zech 10:5
These two passages prove that Jesus’s intentions were not peaceful when he ordered a foal of an ass to enter Jerusalem. He intended to destroy the enemies of Israel and institute a Jewish kingdom—only then would he bring peace to the world. When Jesus enters Jerusalem on a colt, the foal of an ass, he is stating, “I am the king!”
Zechariah is thoroughly apocalyptic, and indeed the second part of Zechariah is purely Essene in its sentiments. It goes on at length about God fighting the nations and restoring Judah and Jerusalem to introduce the kingdom of God. In Zechariah 14:4, the miracle on the Mount of Olives which will precede the coming of the Lord of hosts is predicted. It is followed by the nations of the earth being punished. Peace is spoken unto nations only when the kingdom is established. Note that Zechariah declares the king a just man and one having salvation. A just man is a righteous one, a zaddik, a name used by the Essenes of themselves. And having salvation is the very meaning of Jesus, suggesting that Jesus was a messianic title rather than a name.
In Mark 11:3, when Jesus says, “the Lord has need of it”, by “Lord” he meant God not himself, as Christians always think. Jesus would have called no one Lord but God, and Matthew 21:3 supports the rest of the reading, although Matthew has the impression that Jesus rode on two animals simultaneously, so refers to “them”. It seems a mistake the literate Essene would not make, so it might be a later insertion by a Greek, or it shows Matthew, if Jewish, was a Hellenized Jew, and probably not an Essene. One could speculate that the Essenes of Qumran permanently kept a foal ready for the messiah.
By deliberately entering Jerusalem on a foal, Jesus publicly declared himself king of the Jews, and declared his intention of following the prophecy of Zechariah. No Jew could have mistaken the symbolism and the crowd call out:
Hosanna and Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord: Blessed be the kingdom of our father David, that cometh in the name of the Lord: Hosanna in the highest.
Mark also says the crowd waved branches as he entered the city, more symbolism—in Zechariah 6:12-13 the messiah is the branch—but possibly also hiding the fact that the crowd was armed. The branches were staves and swords.
Lest anyone should accuse me of being too free with Mark in my interpretations, when it comes to justifying the unjustifiable, the clergy do not hesitate to throw Mark out of the window. By one Christian explanation of the branches, the entry was not at Passover but at the festival of booths when branches were waved. So Jesus was teaching in the temple for a period of fully six months before the Jews got rid of him!
Remarkably, in view of the sequel, one can read in Christian commentaries discussions of why the authorities took no action against this messianic demonstration! The Christian is so blinded to the blazingly obvious, it defies understanding. The authorities did indeed take action for this and other violations of the civil law and the result was that their instigator paid a felon’s price for them. Perhaps they mean, “Why did they not take immediate action?”. Exactly! If they could have taken immediate action they would have done. The reason they did not is that Jesus and his Nazarenes were de facto in control of the city, because the Romans had withdrawn.
Mark 11:9 and 11:10 have been garbled somewhat. The first cry is from Psalms 118:26 but the second and third would seem nonsensical to a Jew. The hand of the censor might have been at work because Mark’s original account was too obviously revolutionary. Mark, scared of offending his Roman audience, does not want to say that Jesus was literally acclaimed king, merely admitting:
Blessed be the kingdom of our father, David.
He tries to remove anything suggesting a challenge to Caesar whilst making the entry suitably triumphal and messianic. Matthew puts simply:
Blessed be the Son of David,
which, to a Jew, identifies Jesus as a king, though a gentile would not know it. Later writers were less concerned because the Jewish War was now in the past and because Christianity was now better known, not as a revolutionary, but as a mystical movement or superstition, as Roman historians called it. Luke and John therefore had no qualms about it, writing respectively:
Blessed be the king that cometh in the name of the Lord,
and:
Blessed is the king of Israel that cometh in the name of the Lord.
Luke adds a revealing detail in his gospel (Lk 19:39-40). Some Pharisees in the crowd tell him to rebuke his followers for acclaiming him a king. Jesus replies with a reference to Habakkuk 2:10-11, saying, “the stones would cry out”. The subject of the Habakkuk quotation is the priesthood, as the Commentary on Habakkuk makes clear. The Essenes’ interpretation of this passage is that the priests will be judged by God and found guilty in the midst of many people, and would be chastised with brimstone. If the reply was to be appropriate, the inquisitor was not a Pharisee but a Sadducee. To get the correct assonances in the Aramaic, Jesus’s reply must have been, “Should not these children (banim) proclaim, then would these stones (abanim) cry out”, “za’ak” being “to proclaim” or “cry out”. Again his followers are children.
Now “hosanna in the highest” means nothing. Christians have come to believe that “hosanna” means something like “hurrah” or “greetings” so that the crowd are saying, “sincere greetings, Jesus” or “three cheers for Jesus”. The crowd actually shouted “osanna”, an Aramaic word which means “save us” or “deliver us”, meaning from the Roman oppressors, and perhaps best rendered in this context, “free us”. Jeremiah 2:27 indicates, logically enough, that it is shouted in times of trouble, and the Jews had long been held captive in their own homeland by the Romans. The crowd are calling to the man who signals he has come as their king:
Free us, Son of David, Free us, Son of the Most High.
The correct expression was used in the Gospel of the Hebrews, an Aramaic version of Matthew, and in the Nazarene Gospel as Jerome writing in the latter part of the fourth century tells us.
Mark 11:11 and the following passage are added by the author to separate the entry from later events in the temple to give an impression that the entry into Jerusalem was peaceful. Like tourists sightseeing, they have a brief look round then go back to their digs for the night. Matthew and Luke, writing later, are more honest—the cleansing occurs immediately.
Luke concludes his version (Lk 19:41-44) of the entry into Jerusalem with Jesus weeping over the city because it would be sieged and razed—prophesying with hindsight the Jewish War. That Jesus wept on entering the city seems quite likely. No doubt most of the multitude did too.
Christians make the entry a peaceful demonstration of joy that Jesus, the spiritual messiah of God, had arrived. Though the bishops tell us the aim was peaceable, Jesus undertook to ride into the city according to the prophecy of Zechariah, a prophecy that announced the coming of a warrior messiah ready to destroy the nations and initiate the world rule of the Children of Israel. Was God aware of what his son was doing? Could either god, father or son, be so stupid? A more likely explanation is that Jesus intended to be seen as a victorious messiah in the mould of king David. Could he have initiated such a demonstration without a victory?
The Cleansing of the Temple
In Mark 11:15 to 19, the author of the first gospel at last chooses to give us a taste of violence. The travellers’ tales will have included violence so the gospel has to have some somewhere, but it is ludicrously toned down. Jesus—according to John, armed only with a home made whip of knotted cords—overturns the tables in the temple and takes control of it, refusing to let anyone through. Why did the tradesmen themselves not stop him if a piece of string were his only weapon? Why did the temple guard, the civil police of Jerusalem, or Roman legionaries not stop him? Roman soldiers were housed in the Antonia fortress adjacent to the temple and had easy access to the temple and the city. The answer can only be that the Jerusalem garrison had been overpowered, or had withdrawn,
The cleansing of the temple was the minimum any apocalyptic leader was expected to do. Ezekiel 40-48 prescribes the renovation of the temple in detail. An Essene like Jesus had a special hatred of the corrupt temple priesthood and would have been intent on purifying the temple at the first opportunity. Essenes could see only corruption in the way the Sadducees conducted temple business and scriptural passages dear to the Essenes prescribed the cleansing of Jerusalem of strangers and visitors. Zechariah 14:21 concludes with:
In that day there shall be no more a Canaanite in the house of the Lord of Hosts.
In the scriptures, a Canaanite is a non-Jew—a gentile!
The cleansing was not merely to stop the temple being used as a market place. The market which Jesus wrecked was in the court of the gentiles, separated by an inviolable wall from the sacred parts of the temple, the two inner courts. But pollution is not contained by walls! Jesus at the transfiguration had undertaken to cleanse the courts as the ritual in Zechariah 3:7, which Jesus followed at the transfiguration, tells us:
Thou shalt keep my courts.
Jesus makes a speech to explain his action to those remaining but it has been partly suppressed. A hint of its content is preserved in Mark 11:17 which has been introduced by Mark’s formula indicating a new source. Here he quotes Isaiah 56:7 which seems to oppose his action, and Jeremiah 7:11 which supports it. Plainly Jesus has been confronted by the temple authorities who ask him why he has cleared out the court of the gentiles contrary to the teaching of Isaiah. From Mark’s clues, his answer would have been:
Holdeth these strangers to the covenant of the Lord? It is indeed written, My house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer, but ye have made it a den of thieves. Saith the Lord, I will cast you out of my sight.
God’s condition in Isaiah for gentiles (strangers) to enter the temple was that they should join themselves to the Lord—become Jewish proselytes. These gentiles had not done so and were unclean. Since God’s holy house was unclean it was unfit for God to step into, and yet his kingdom was nigh. It answered Jeremiah’s description—it was a den of thieves which God would cast out of his sight. And so Jesus had done, following God’s will.
Naturally the Sadducees were annoyed. The evangelist has emphasized this to deflect attention from the rebellion. In Matthew 21:15-16 we get a detail missing in Mark. it reads:
And when the chief priests and scribes saw the wonderful things that he did, and the children crying in the temple, and saying, Hosanna to the Son of David; they were sore displeased, And said unto him, Hearest thou what these say? And Jesus saith unto them, Yea; have ye never read, Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise?
Of course the children crying Hosannas in the temple were not young children as theologians infer from the subsequent quotation from Psalms 8:2. Who could believe anything other than that they were the Children of Israel weeping in gratitude and praising their king who had just purified the defiled temple? That is what they were and the meaning of the psalm proves it. The quotation in Matthew, intended for gentiles, is a misrepresentation. The psalm properly reads:
Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.
Jesus is saying that God ordained these Children weeping in gratitude like babies to provide the strength to subdue Israel’s enemies. And that they had done. There is confirmation in the apocryphal Book of Thomas the Contender where in one passage Jesus says:
You are babes until you become perfect,
obviously using “babes” as a metaphor, suggesting that Essene terminology for the Simple of Ephraim, besides “Children”, was “babes”. Jesus also refers to the Elect and the doctrine of the perfect suggesting this work is linked to the Essenes.
These passages end with the barren fig tree withering away, the metaphorical withering of the Romans.
Did Jesus do it alone? That was the idea Mark wanted to give but it is manifestly nonsense unless Jesus wore blue leotards. He did it with his disciples. And not just those noted as the twelve or even the pious invention, the seventy, but the whole of his army—four or five thousand, if the gospels are to be believed, a hundred to nine hundred if profane sources are accepted. The gospels imply there was little resistance to the cleansing of the temple but the misplaced story of the legion of devils disguised as swine is really the previous defeat of the Jerusalem garrison in the valley of the brook Kidron. The surviving soldiers judiciously withdrew to await reinforcements.
Could Roman legionaries really have been defeated by Jesus’s gang? There is no denying even from the gospels that the Nazarenes assumed civil power even though only temporarily, and Jesus was tried for the crime of Laesae Majestatis. If Jesus had been a lone demonstrator, as the gospels suggest, he would have been instantly arrested by the temple guards. The reason they could not is that the Nazarenes were in control. Though we have few clues about the Nazarenes’ arms or their skills in warfare, they were evidently determined and strengthened by the power of religious conviction—they were fanatics. And the Romans will have found that there was more to worry about than the Nazarene militia—they and their cause were popular.
Jerusalem at Passover time, according to Josephus, was packed with almost three million pilgrims. These are the babes and sucklings whom Jesus acknowledges as having given the strength for the Nazarenes to still their enemies. The Roman commander of the Antonia Fortress, with only two thousand infantrymen, could not contain such numbers and, having suffered a defeat beneath the Mount of Olives, must have chosen to withdraw until additional soldiers came up to Jerusalem from Caesarea on the coast. That would have taken a few days. And according to Mark, it is a few days that Jesus had in control of the city.
D E Nineham naïvely or dishonestly asks:
If Jesus was assisted by his followers why did the temple police or the Roman garrison do nothing? and Why was the matter not raised at Jesus’s trial?
Answers respectively, they bowed to a superior force, and it was. Luke 23:2 gives “perverting our nation” as one of Jesus’s crimes. It means sedition—the crime of Laesae Majestatis, inciting the people to assume the power of government illegally. A single demonstrator armed with string could not have done it.
Authority
Mark implies the events he recounts next occurred on a later visit to Jerusalem but obviously they did not. The chief priests, scribes and elders ask him:
By what authority doest thou these things? and who gave thee this authority to do these things?
showing it was on the occasion of the cleansing. They are inviting him to admit he is acting as a king. Authority, sometimes translated as power, is code for a king. They are saying:
You have to be the king to do this. Who made you a king?
Jesus is unperturbed. His answer really means:
What’s it to you? You can do nothing about it.
Mark explains why. If the temple officials agreed that John the Baptist had God’s authority, that was sufficient because Jesus was his successor. If they denied it, he had the de facto authority of the crowd and the Nazarenes. Jesus was in charge, either way, and when they declined to answer there was nothing more to be said.
People recognized Jesus as having the authority or power of a king according to the scriptures. Those that had ears to hear would understand!
From this point on, in Mark, we have several debates between Jesus and the Sadducees and perhaps some Pharisees. So far as it is possible to tell previous disputes in Mark have not been with Jesus’s opponents but with his converts—the simple of Ephraim. In the Community Rule we learn that the Master shall not rebuke the men of the pit, or dispute with them, and will not grapple with the men of perdition until the day of God’s vengeance. The Damascus Rule explains that the men of the pit are the rich— primarily the Sadducees. It seems that the capture of Jerusalem and the temple for Jesus freed him to grapple with and rebuke the men of the pit. It must have signified the day of God’s vengeance—Jesus felt free to argue with the priesthood but also he must now have expected God or the archangel Michael to act.
The Wicked Husbandmen
According to Mark, Jesus now relates the parable of the wicked husbandmen, a parable which was spoken against the temple authorities (Mk 12:12). The gate of the temple sanctuary was decorated with a magnificent solid gold vine representing Israel and meant to remind the priesthood that God had given them charge of Israel as its husbandmen. There can be no argument but that the description of the vineyard is an allegorical description of Israel. The metaphor is used in Isaiah 5:1-7 and the beginning of this parable uses the same imagery. Yet commentaries on the gospels swear black and blue that this is not an allegory because parables are not allegories. Well parables are, and this plainly is.
If the vineyard is Israel and the man is God, then the wicked husbandmen are the temple priesthood who want to keep the fruits of the vineyard for themselves. They kill or maim the messengers, meaning the prophets, sent by God. Essenes regarded themselves as prophets. Only the Sadducees rejected the prophets as a point of principle—Sadducees were concerned only with the Torah not the later books of the scriptures—further proof that the story was directed at the priesthood. Finally God sends his wellbeloved son, “wellbeloved” signifying that he is a king. The parable would have continued from 12:7:
and the son evicted the wicked husbandmen and returned the vineyard to the hands of his father.
The parable justified Jesus’s eviction of the corrupt temple priesthood, and the return of Israel to its proper owner, God.
Unfortunately this happy ending was later spoiled by the son himself being crucified. Mark therefore had to alter it. From 12:7 onwards, the son was also killed, the tenants killed by the father and the vineyard handed to others—the gentile church. If Mark’s ending were genuine it would have been another prediction by Jesus of his death, a prediction of the destruction of the temple and a prediction of the gentile church. To a rational person this cries out that it was added after 70 AD.
The assertion that the vineyard owner “went into another country” signifies the feeling that God no longer dwelt with his people as he had at the time of Moses in the desert. Conventional commentators, immune to the idea of allegory, create for themselves even more problems. They say the story, to be the sort of parable they want, must be realistic and it is unrealistic to have a landlord with such patience that he sent many servants. Does it make them begin to think it is an allegory in which the landlord is God? No! The story has been altered! There should have been only three servants.
The quotation which follows is from Psalms 118:22-23, a song which cries for “the day which the Lord hath made”, meaning the day of the restoration of the kingdom. It is the psalm which the crowd sang at the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. The humble stone rejected by the builders became the head of the corner, a corner stone, the basis of the temple. The Christian interpretation is that the humble stone was Jesus, a humble man, but that is only partly true. In the psalm it is Israel that is the humble stone—compassed about by all nations, its gentile enemies. The prayer in the song is that Israel will cut off these enemies. Many of the psalms have much in them to suggest an Essene origin and the Essenes would read as Israel in this context, not the whole nation which was all Israel but the remnant of Israel that was righteous, namely, themselves. The humble stone elevated to the greatest was meant to be the replacement of the official priesthood by the humblest of men, the poor men, the Essenes. In the sense that Jesus was their leader, the Christian reading is correct.
In Matthew 21:28-32 the parable of the wicked husbandmen is preceded by another parable about a vineyard—the parable of the two sons. The parable will have followed the one about the husbandmen rather than preceded it. The second son portrays the rulers of Israel who undertook to do God’s work but did not. The first son portrays the repentant sinners—the publicans and harlots—who believed John the Baptist and were baptized. Interesting here is that Matthew indirectly acknowledges that most of the Nazarene converts came from the efforts of John the Baptist not Jesus or his disciples. Matthew also says:
John came unto you in the way of righteousness,
using the Essene expression, “the way of righteousness”. John and Jesus were Essenes.
After Jesus had finished the parable of the wicked husbandmen, the chief priests were surely outraged. They believed they were doing God’s work, and they took the fact that they were so rich to be God’s approval. They were impotent to do anything but would have expressed their outrage to Jesus. Jesus replied with his second parable.
